RTRIM working with SELECT but not with UPDATE

Question

I've moved a database from DB2 to SQL Server 2016 using Microsoft's Migration tool. Many of my source tables in DB2 are the CHARACTER data type and it maps to a CHAR in SQL Server. Once the tables are moved over I'm getting trailing spaces in my SQL Server tables. Using a SELECT I can remove them in query results using LTRIM(RTRIM(column)), but if I use

 UPDATE table SET column = LTRIM(RTRIM(column)) 

the trailing spaces remain.

Answer 1

You want to map to a VARCHAR() in SQL Server.

The CHAR() data type is fixed length with trailing spaces for shorter strings.